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13 May 2014

Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents and skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story
about book design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were
either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the
books were as diverse as the geography they covered:

Nigeria, Zimbabwe,
South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly
divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize
winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange
sunset over the veld, or both.

“In short,” the post said, “the covers
of most novels ‘about Africa’ seem to have been designed by someone
whose principal idea of the continent comes from The Lion King.”

What makes the persistence of these tired and inaccurate images even worse is that we’re living in an era of brilliantbookdesign (including this lovely, type-only cover for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah; her novel Half of a Yellow Sun begins the collage above). So why is it so hard for publishers of African authors to rise beyond cliché?

I asked Peter Mendelsund—who is an associate art director of Knopf, a gifted cover designer, and the author of a forthcoming book
on the complex alliances between image and text—to help me understand
how the publishing industry got to a place where these crude visual
stereotypes are recycled ad nauseam. (Again and again, that acacia
tree!)

He points first to “laziness, both individual or institutionalized.”
Like most Americans, book designers tend not to know all that much about
the rest of the world, and since they don’t always have the time to
respond to a book on its own terms, they resort to visual clichés.
Meanwhile, editors sometimes forget what made a manuscript unique to
begin with. In the case of non-Western novels, they often fall back on
framing it with “a vague, Orientalist sense of place,” Mendelsund says,
and they’re enabled by risk-averse marketing departments.

“By the time the manuscript is ready to be produced, there’s a really
strong temptation to follow a path that’s already been trod,” he says.
“If someone goes out on a limb and tries something different, and the
book doesn’t sell, you know who to blame: the guy who didn’t put the
acacia tree on the cover.”

He adds that the underlying issue can be more pernicious: “Of course,
there are the deeply ingrained problems of post-colonialist and
Orientalist attitudes. We’re comfortable with this visual image of
Africa because it’s safe. It presents ‘otherness’ in a way that’s easy
to understand. That’s ironic, because what is fiction if not a way for
you to stretch your empathetic muscles?”

That’s a reasonable diagnosis. But how to solve the underlying
problem? Certain books are allowed to stand on their own; others—too
often those by African, Muslim, or female authors—are
assigned genre stereotypes. Mendelsund suggests that designers should
start by initiating conversations with editors about what makes a book
unique, so that they have something to respond to visually. And if that
fails, and designers are pressured to use an offensive stereotype,
Mendelsund says, “We can tell them that it’s racist, xenophobic,
whatever.”

But change comes slowly. One day, Mendelsund predicts, there will be a
best-selling novel by an African writer that happens to use a different
visual aesthetic, and its success will introduce a new set of arbitrary
images to represent Africa in Western eyes. “But right now, we’re in
the age of the tree,” he says. “For that vast continent, in all its
diversity, you get that one fucking tree.”